FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — Basketball players who frequent South Florida parks feel they are being shunned in favor of wealthy residents of new luxury housing developments.
The city of Fort Lauderdale plans to replace its decades-old waterfront basketball court with a pickleball court as part of a deal with a developer for a large condominium and hotel project.
While local basketball players have garnered a lot of support online, city officials and developers said the changes are part of a larger improvement plan for the park that also includes building a new basketball court a few hundred yards away.
unpleasant surprise
Ozzie McCrea said most people who use the basketball courts only learned of the changes at Fort Lauderdale Beach Park in April. He helped organize a group called the Fort Lauderdale Beach Ballers to save the court, which is just a few dozen steps from the Atlantic Ocean.
“I saw a sign posted saying the basketball court was being converted to a pickleball court,” McCrea said. “And it raised a lot of flags, and it was a very surreal moment because everyone who saw that sign could feel their heart drop out of nowhere.”
McCrea said the message was clear. Developers say they hope to change the demographics of the area by allowing condominium residents, where working-class and diverse people are not welcome, to use the public park across the street as a private club.
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“It’s a very multicultural atmosphere here. We have people of all ages and all ethnicities,” McCrea said. “And it’s a beautiful thing because we’re all in harmony here. We’re all playing basketball.”
Some advocates have linked the old basketball court to the civil rights movement and the push to desegregate beaches. Photos show Fort Lauderdale beach basketball courts from the 1960s, but local historians believe those courts were located elsewhere. The present courthouse is believed to have been established at least a decade later.
make a deal
Fort Lauderdale City Commissioners approved a contract with a developer in January 2024 for construction of the St. Regis Resort & Residences Bahia Mar. The $2 billion project includes four residential towers and a hotel tower adjacent to an existing marina on city-owned land under a 100-year lease.
The developers agreed to pay $1 million for improvements to the park, including replacing the aging and rarely used basketball courts with pickleball courts.
Public-private partnerships like this are not new.
Maria Ilcheva, a public policy professor at Florida International University, said partnerships between local governments and private companies have become more common in South Florida and other regions across the U.S. over the past 20 years due to population growth and rapid development. There’s nothing inherently wrong with these agreements, she said, and governments can often negotiate transportation, parks and other infrastructure improvements in exchange for project approval.
“These partnerships can be valuable if they take local context into account and ensure that local communities benefit from them,” Ilcheva said. “If we don’t take into account the community perspective and give a broader consideration to how that impacts on values and how it could potentially motivate or displace local people, it could have a negative impact on the community.”
Move rather than remove
Fort Lauderdale City Commissioner Steve Glassman said the park will remain city property and accessible to the public while the developer pays for park improvements.
Glassman said this was all part of the agenda and was passed unanimously with no public opposition during the meeting.
When community members began raising concerns earlier this year, Glassman said the city worked with a developer to plan a new basketball court a few hundred yards away on the other side of the park.
“We have pickleball, we have basketball, we have new fitness equipment, we have new picnic tables, we have new grills,” Glassman said. “So instead of removing the basketball court, we’re moving the basketball court.”
However, beach bowlers have doubts, fearing plans for a new basketball court will be abandoned after the old court is gone. The group is also supporting a separate effort to officially designate the park as a site of historical significance. Experts believe the park is the site of a 19th-century fort used during the Seminole Wars.
“We feel there is no reason to move these courtrooms,” McCrea said. “If they want to add something, they would have to relocate the pickleball courts where they want to relocate the basketball courts.”
it’s too far
Developer Jimmy Tate said he would be happy to resolve the entire situation by keeping the basketball courts as they are and putting the pickleball courts elsewhere. But they’ve already pre-sold dozens of condos and created millions of dollars of marketing materials, including a giant model showing a pickleball court.
“We can’t do that at this point. There are just too many things going on and there should be no misrepresentation of the facts in any contract,” he said.
Tate rejected the idea that he was trying to deny beach access based on race or socio-economic status. He believes the opposition has less to do with the basketball courts and more to do with a small group of people who have opposed Bahia Mar’s redevelopment for years, and who have also thwarted plans by two previous developers.
He said the fact that the city and developer have committed to building a brand new basketball court in the same park proves the protests aren’t actually about the courts.
“Ironically, I’ve been playing basketball my whole life,” Tate said. “I don’t play pickleball.”
